=== === ============= ====
=== === == == ==
== == ==== == == =
== ==== === == == ==
== == == == = ==
== == == == ==
== == == ====
M U S I C T H E O R Y O N L I N E
A Publication of the
Society for Music Theory
Copyright (c) 1998 Society for Music Theory
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Volume 4, Number 2 March, 1998 ISSN: 1067-3040 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
All queries to: mto-editor@smt.ucsb.edu or to
mto-manager@smt.ucsb.edu
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
AUTHOR: Schmalfeldt, Janet
TITLE: On Keeping the Score
KEYWORDS:ethnicity, feminism, gender, sexuality,
McClary, McCreless, musical autonomy, new musicology
Janet Schmalfeldt
Tufts University
Department of Music
20 Professors Row
Medford, MA 02155
jschmalf@emerald.tufts.edu
ABSTRACT: This essay proposes and then explores the view that the most
profound and beneficial changes in the field of music theory within
the last decade have come about in response to pressures from without
to relinquish the notion of music as autonomous. I ask anew why our
field has waited so long to acknowledge that the creation,
performance, and study of music cannot help but be implicated in both
past and present social, cultural, and political concerns. My
overview celebrates the inspired contributions of individuals who have
recently demonstrated how music theory can embrace ever broader
cultural contexts without at the same time abandoning the analyst's
commitment to interpreting the musical score.
[1] For more reasons than one, it just doesn't seem possible to me
that only within this last decade--even less than ten years ago--our
Baltimore joint-conference hallways were buzzing about Maynard
Solomon's paper on Schubert and the peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini.(1)
That was in 1988. Only one year earlier--just ten years ago this
month--did our conference promote the first official session of
something called a Committee on the Status of Women. Even harder to
believe, Susan McClary's *Feminine Endings* hit the stands only as
recently as 1991, also the year of the first Feminist Theory and Music
Conference, in Minneapolis.(2) And the first AMS/SMT Conference to be
held jointly with the Center for Black Music Research, inaugurated in
1980, took place just two years ago. Topics concerning ethnicity,
feminism, gender, and sexuality have by now so clearly made an impact
on our field that they seem to have been with us for much longer. But
colleagues in other fields--literature, philosophy, the social
sciences, drama, art history, film, dance, you name it--are
predictably incredulous when they learn that these issues are still so
relatively new for us.
=============================================
1. Subsequently published by Maynard Solomon as "Franz Schubert and
the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini," *19th-Century Music* 12.3 (1989):
193-206. See also Solomon's "Franz Schubert's 'My Dream'," *American
Imago* 38 (1981): 137-54.
2. Susan McClary, *Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality*
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
=============================================
[2] I submit today that these new cultural and social concerns are the
ones to have exerted both the most profound and the most beneficial
changes our field has seen in the last decade. Before dismissing this
observation as pure cant, please think about it with me. Profound?
Beneficial? On what grounds can I make these claims? And if I can
indeed substantiate them, then how did it happen that the field of
music theory seems as if to have waited for the 1990s before even
tentatively beginning to investigate such concerns?
[3] This last question engages countless elusive issues--academic,
political, philosophical, sociological, dare I say even "purely
musical." For the record, Susan McClary's sharp critiques of our
field have from the very outset been complemented by her efforts to
provide explanations for our behavior. In the following statement,
from as early as 1988, her judgment is gentle yet firm: "Feminism has
been very late in making an appearance in music criticism, and this is
largely owing to the success composers, musicologists, and theorists
have had in maintaining the illusion that music is an entirely
autonomous realm."(3) In the 1997 collection of essays called *Keeping
Score*, my distinguished plenary-session colleague Patrick McCreless
presents a superb study in which he brings Michel Foucault's version
of the old adage "Knowledge is Power" to the task of construing *why*
we theorists in particular have been so reluctant to relinquish the
illusion that music is autonomous. McCreless posits that the
willingness of two powerful East-Coast research universities--Yale and
Princeton--to regard modern music theory as a professional academic
discipline ultimately hinged in the 1950s on that very same illusion.
Like others, Pat sees the twentieth-century notion of absolute music
as a vestige of the shift in the early nineteenth century from
compositional pedagogy to analysis, and towards an aesthetic of
genius, originality, and romantic subjectivity.(4)
=============================================
3. McClary, "Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music
Composition," *Cultural Critique* 12 (1989), republished in *Keeping
Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture*, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid
Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1997), 64.
4. Patrick McCreless, "Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory," in
*Keeping Score*, 21, passim. See also, for example, Carl Dahlhaus,
*The Idea of Absolute Music*, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1989; orig. pub. as *Die Idee der absoluten Musik*
[Kassel: Baerenreiter, 1978]); Janet Schmalfeldt, "Form as the Process
of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and 'Tempest' Sonata,"
*Beethoven Forum* 4 (1995): 37-71.
=============================================
[4] In Pat's view, in other words, our entree itself into the academy
depended upon the following achievements of our American founding
fathers--Milton Babbitt and Allen Forte: first, they regained
intellectual respectability for music theory by shaking off its stigma
in this country as mere pedagogy; second, they accomplished this by
demonstrating most especially through twelve-tone, Schenkerian, and
pitch-class set theories that our field is both a rigorous and a
creative mode of thought. As what Pat calls "the driving intellectual
forces of the discipline," these two "central poles" "share a value
system that explicitly privileges rigor, system, and theory-based
analysis and implicitly share an aesthetic ideology whereby analysis
validates masterworks that exhibit an unquestioned structural
autonomy."(5) From this perspective, we might just draw some
understanding as to why it has been difficult for modern music
theorists to give intellectual energy to the ways in which music
reflects or expresses extra-musical meaning of any kind--whether this
be relative to biography, social function, or even ethnic or national
differences, let alone gender and sexuality: our initial prestige in
the American academy, whence to this day cometh pay checks for most of
us, rested on our promise that we could *explain* music in *purely
musical terms*, rather than merely effuse about it. Better yet, we
could promise to do this at a time when most musicologists were not
particularly interested in theory, analysis, or criticism of any kind.
=============================================
5. McCreless, "Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory," 31-32.
=============================================
[5] Imagine our surprise, then, when our perhaps uneasy but ostensibly
self-assured relationship with musicology began to show signs of
crumbling in the early 1980s. The appearance of two sharp-pointed
attacks on our kinds of analysis--from Joseph Kerman in 1980 and Leo
Treitler in 1982(6)--created so much indignation (read alarm here)
for some of us in the Theory Department at McGill University that we
organized a special McGill colloquium to discuss these articles. But
Kerman's and Treitler's critiques were only the beginnings--the first
stage in what has since been perceived as a real siege on music
theory. During moments of the invited session entitled "Contemporary
Theory and the 'New Musicology'" at our 1995 joint conference in New
York, something dubbed by someone as "the new musicology" seemed to
have become the name of our enemy.
=============================================
6. Joseph Kerman, "How We Got into Analysis, and How We Can Get Out,"
*Critical Inquiry* 7 (1980): 311-31; Leo Treitler, "To Worship That
Celestial Sound: Motives for Analysis," *Journal of Musicology* 1
(1982): 153-70 (reprinted in his *Music and the Historical
Imagination* [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989] as
chap. 2). See also Kerman's *Contemplating Music* (Cambridge, M.A.:
Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 3: "Analysis, Theory, and New
Music."
=============================================
[6] But let's face it: as a postmodernist phenomenon, the "new
musicology" has itself been phenomenally slow to arrive. How can we
fathom that it took so many musicologists as well as theorists, most
of us generally humanists at heart, such a long time to investigate
the idea that the creation, performance, and study of music simply
cannot help but be implicated in both past and present social,
cultural, and political concerns? And, to this day, how comfortable
have we become with the notion that *music theory* might actually
profit from an engagement with some of the great outcries for social
change our society and our world have seen in this century--movements
towards real equity in respect to race, gender, and sexual
orientation, with concomitant efforts to undercut bigotry and
parochialism by breaking down cultural hegemonies?
[7] As McCreless readily explains, a Foucauldian assessment of any
discipline treats the discipline as a social institution that
regulates, or controls, individuals through its discourse; in Pat's
words, Foucault "tends to focus on discourse as an abstract site of
knowledge, and to remove from this arena the motivation and action of
the individual subject."(7) Allow me to take quite a different tack
today: I'd like to reverse Foucault's strategy by shifting the focus
from our discipline as an institution, or society, to some of its
individual members, if only towards the goal of acknowledging recent
individual contributions to our field. My premise should be obvious:
disciplines become established as such mainly through the efforts of
those individuals whose ideas seem to have emerged at just the right
time and in the right place; by the same ineluctable process, the
discourse of a discipline can change. Here, then, is some history
"modeled on biography and human action,"(8) or, shall we say, an
anecdotal approach to our recent history, informally inspired by
Richard Rorty's ideas in his *Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity*,
from 1989.(9)
=============================================
7. McCreless, "Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory," 16.
8. Ibid.
9. Richard Rorty, *Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity* (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
=============================================
[8] Few would deny that the rise of the professional theorist in this
country during the 1950s was partly, and "first of all"--as Milton
Babbitt says--"a result of Schenker and of people who came over here
who were Schenker students."(10) But third- and fourth-generation
Schenkerians who in turn studied with one or more of those
people--Hans Weisse, Felix Salzer, Oswald Jonas, and Ernst Oster--can
confirm, ironically, that, as immigrants, these teachers certainly did
not find an easy market for Schenkerian theory during the 1960s or
even in the early 70s. On a personal note, I can report that, as a
candidate in 1970 for the M.M.A degree in Piano Performance, I did not
have an easy time "defending" the Schenkerian aspects of my Masters
thesis to my performance teachers in the Yale School of Music. So
much for all that intellectual rigor and creative analytical thought
that was supposed to have legitimized American music theory as an
academic discipline by the late 50s. If, around 1979, when Schenker's
*Free Composition (Der freie Satz)* appeared in English translation,
we had begun to show signs of smugness about our beautiful
voice-leading graphs, let's remember that only around then had
institutions begun to exhibit pressure to hire Schenkerians who could
also teach pitch-class set theory. And, if modern music theory has
indeed been in competition with musicology for certain kinds of power
through knowledge, then the appearance of Kerman's and Treitler's
articles so shortly after 1979 seems like more than a coincidence.
But I'll contend that some brilliant pedagogy coupled with an
ideological commitment to Schenker's ideas on the part of those first,
lone immigrant teachers initially sparked comparable passions in the
hearts and minds of just a few receptive, gifted theorists, and that
the subsequent dissemination of Schenkerian thought here and abroad
can be greatly understood as contingent on the far-reaching actions of
those individuals, rather than as a Foucauldian demonstration of our
discipline qua regulative institution. Envision, if you will, please,
the image of John Rothgeb in 1970 as an impassioned young theorist
driving alone in his '64 Volvo all the way from Austin, Texas, to
Riverside, California, for the single purpose of meeting and studying
with Oswald Jonas, as recommended by Jonas's student, and John's
teacher, Ernst Oster.
=============================================
10. Milton Babbitt, *Words about Music*, ed. Stephen Dembski and
Joseph N. Straus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 121.
=============================================
[9] If our field has now begun to drive in new directions, this has
once again come about most especially, I think, as a result of the
passionate, persuasive, persistent, and highly productive efforts of
certain remarkable individuals. Where have these scholars come from?
Not, initially, from the rank and file of the Society for Music
Theory, it must be admitted; and not even so obviously from the core
of the AMS. Maynard Solomon's profoundly stimulating biographical
studies of Beethoven, Ives, Schubert, and Mozart suggest a remarkable
contact with the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis.(11) Susan
McClary's writings reflect her intensive involvement with feminist
criticism in literary, film, and performance-artist studies.
Lawrence Kramer's wonderfully provocative books each overtly draw on
his expertise in postmodernist literary theory as an Associate
Professor of English.(12) Carolyn Abbate brings a command of both
literary theory and semiotics to her work in musical narrative.(13) In
other words, all four of these recently influential writers have
devoted themselves to exhaustive interdisciplinary research. And,
though none of them has insisted that we should all do the same, they
have, each in their own way, urged us--or, perhaps in the case of some
of our members, shown that we have permission--to explore new, broader
contexts for our analytic skills, and to think critically about the
kinds of messages that music, music theory, and music analysis might
transmit and embrace as cultural forces.
=============================================
11. Solomon, *Beethoven* (New York: Schirmer Books, 1977); *Beethoven
Essays* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); "Charles
Ives: Some Questions of Veracity," *Journal of the American
Musicological Society* 40 (1987): 466-69; *Mozart: A Life* (New York:
HarperCollins, 1995). See also note 1.
12. Lawrence Kramer, *Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and
After* (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1984); *Music and Cultural Practice, 1800-1900* (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, University of California Press, 1990); *Classical Music and
Postmodern Knowledge* (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1995).
13. Carolyn Abbate, *Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the
Nineteenth Century* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
=============================================
[10] Whether or not the ideas of Solomon, McClary, Kramer, and Abbate
have directly or even indirectly inspired the profusion of
interdisciplinary, cultural, deconstructive, feminist, gender,
sexuality, reception, popular, jazz, and rock studies in music since
1991, we have certainly witnessed this outpouring, now emanating from
the more central card-carrying ranks of musicology and music theory.
Amongst musicologists, consider, for example, Jeffrey Kallberg's work
on the rhetoric of genre and on the subject of sex in receptions of
Chopin's music, or Kristina Muxfeldt's arduous documentary studies on
the question of Schubert's sexuality.(14) Note the coming-together of
essays by musicologists *and* theorists--as if this distinction were
really appropriate when describing Kofi Agawu, Susan McClary, James
Webster, and Robert S. Winter--in the Commentary section within the
1993 Special Issue of *19th-Century Music*, the issue entitled
"Schubert: Music, Sexuality, Culture."(15)
=============================================
14. Jeffrey Kallberg, "The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin's Nocturne in G
Minor," *19th-Century Music* 11.3 (1988): 238-61; Kallberg, "Small
Fairy Voices: Sex, History and Meaning in Chopin," in *Chopin Studies*
2, ed. John Rink and Jim Samson, pp. 50-71 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994); Kristina Muxfeldt, "Political Crimes and
Liberty, or Why Would Schubert Eat a Peacock?," *19th-Century Music*
17 (1993): 47-64; Muxfeldt, "Schubert, Platen, and the Myth of
Narcissus," *Journal of the American Musicological Society* 49.3
(1996): 480-527.
15. Kofi Agawu, "Schubert's Sexuality: A Prescription for Analysis?";
McClary, "Music and Sexuality: On the Steblin/Solomon Debate"; James
Webster, "Music, Pathology, Sexuality, Beethoven, Schubert"; and
Robert S. Winter, "Whose Schubert?," in *19th-Century Music* 17.1
(1993): Special Issue, ed. Lawrence Kramer, pp. 79-101.
=============================================
[11] From within the membership of our SMT, let's especially celebrate
the individual contributions of Fred Everett Maus, Marion Guck, and
Joseph Dubiel on such issues, among many, as masculine discourse in
music theory, analytical fictions, and deconstruction.(16)
Musicologist Ruth Solie's outspoken reading of Schumann's
*Frauenliebe* songs, her critique of theorist Pieter van den Toorn's
first publication about politics, feminism, and music theory, her
leadership as editor of the collection *Musicology and Difference*,
and her article on defining "feminism" in the first issue of the brand
new journal *Women and Music* have all made a very big difference
within our field.(17) But then so have van den Toorn's responses to
McClary, Treitler, Kerman, and Solie, in his ardent book-length
defense of musical autonomy and technical analysis.(18) Finally, we
have, in the latest issue of *19th-Century Music*, Marianne
Kielian-Gilbert's evocative meditation *a l'ecriture feminine* on van
den Toorn's ideas about immediacy and the aesthetic experience; with
this work, we can sense that the text/context debate delicately rests
at the base of a new plateau: the dialogue between McClary and van den
Toorn that Marianne imaginatively construes augurs well for those of
us who never understood in the first place why text and context should
be in conflict.(19)
=============================================
16. Fred Everett Maus, "Masculine Discourse in Music Theory,"
*Perspectives of New Music* 31.2 (1993): 264-93; Marion Guck,
"Analytical Fictions," *Music Theory Spectrum* 16.2 (1994): 217-30;
Joseph Dubiel, "On Getting Deconstructed," *Music Theory Online* 2.2
(1996).
17. Ruth A. Solie, "Whose Life? The Gendered Self in Schumann's
*Frauenliebe* Songs," in *Music and Text: Critical Inquiries*,
ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
219-40; "What Do Feminists Want? A Reply to Pieter van den Toorn,"
*Journal of Musicology* 9 (1991): 399-410; Solie, ed., *Musicology and
Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship* (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); "Defining
'Feminism': Conundrums, Context, Communities," *Women and Music: A
Journal of Gender and Culture* 1 (1997); Pieter van den Toorn,
"Politics, Feminism, and Contemporary Music Theory," *Journal of
Musicology* 9 (1991): 275-99.
18. van den Toorn, *Music, Politics, and the Academy* (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
19. Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, "Invoking Motives and Immediacy: Foils
and Contexts for Pieter C. van den Toorn's *Music, Politics, and the
Academy*," *19th-Century Music* 20.3 (1997): 253-78.
=============================================
[12] It really does seem to me, in short, that the kinds of
contributions I've just mentioned have had a tremendously creative and
liberating affect on our field; and there are so many other
contributions I've had to neglect. It is of course absolutely
essential to note, as Paula Higgins has done so emphatically,(20) that
much excellent historical work on music by women had already appeared
in the 1980s, well before McClary's earliest articles, and before the
appearance of the 1987 collection *Music and Society: The Politics of
Composition, Performance, and Reception*, which McClary edited along
with Richard Leppert. But Janet Wolff's lead article in this volume
(21) seems to have struck on the topic--the ideology of autonomous
art--that would become the Achilles' heel of music theorists,
eliciting genuine, explosive reactions both pro and con. And, let's
be frank, for a minority, yet substantial, membership within our
society, "permission" in the form of encouragement to explode seems to
have come as a welcome relief.
=============================================
20. Paul Higgins, "Women in Music, Feminist Criticism, and Guerrilla
Musicology: Reflections on Recent Polemics," *19th-Century Music* 17.2
(1993): 174-92.
21. Janet Wolff, "Forward: The Ideology of Autonomous Art," in *Music
and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception*,
ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), 1-12.
=============================================
[13] On the other hand, some might ask, Just what gave music theory
permission *not* to address issues of social context for so long? As
a society and a field of inquiry, we've not exactly played a
leadership role here; and as the individual who stands before you
right now, I'm a good case in point. But, for the very reason that I
have not until now publicly entered the arena of feminist or
postmodernist writings about music, I represent the majority of SMT
members, while, at the same time--and I hope like others in my
position--I've been openly receptive to these issues. From this
perspective, perhaps I can claim to bring an unbesieged and
undefensive enthusiasm for the postmodernist breakthroughs I think our
field has made over the course of this last decade. As your next SMT
President, I feel obliged, moreover, to let you know where I stand.
[14] Let me begin with several heartfelt tributes. First, as one who
has been and probably always will be intensely involved with matters
of form in tonal music, I cannot thank Scott Burnham enough for having
aspired to recontextualize A. B. Marx's gendering of sonata form in
face of the embarrassingly superficial and misconstrued
decontextualizations of Marx that have become a trademark of feminist
critiques. Burnham's thorough examination of Marx's views really
ought to put to rest the going assumption that the Marxian sonata-form
plot tells of the triumph of the "masculine" main theme in its
subjugation of the "feminine" secondary theme.(22) Let's also salute
the 1996 SMT Awards Committee for having wasted no time in recognizing
that Burnham's book *Beethoven Hero* superbly demonstrates how
contemporary music theory and analysis can embrace the ever broader
contexts of stylistic studies, reception history, history of theory,
canon formation, and even ethical as well as aesthetic valuation.(23)
Burnham "keeps the score": that is, he offers his own first-rate
analytic insights about Beethoven's scores, both heroic and otherwise;
but he insists that we critically contemplate his analyses, and those
of others, in the light of the ideologies and myths about Beethoven
that analyses can help to construct.
=============================================
22. Scott Burnham, "A. B. Marx and the Gendering of Sonata Form," in
*Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism*, ed. Ian Bent, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 163-86. See, for example, McClary,
*Feminine Endings*, p. 69 and pp. 13-17.
23. Burnham, *Beethoven Hero* (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1995).
=============================================
[15] Second, let me note how fortunate we've been that two of our most
impressive leaders in the recent expansion of theoretical domains just
happen to have been the two most recent Presidents of our SMT--Patrick
McCreless and Joseph Straus. Thanks to these two, and to the hard
work of numerous volunteers, our society now has a Committee on
Diversity and a Committee on Professional Development, with both of
these serving as outreaches that have long been overdue. Like
McCreless, Joe Straus has artfully carried our discipline across the
border into the land of literary theory; and, like Kevin Korsyn, but
in vastly different ways, Straus has provoked some healthy anxiety
about how Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence might serve as yet
another death threat to the notion of absolute music.(24) Joe's
anthology--*Music by Women for Study and Analysis* (1993)--and his
1995 book on the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger place him at the
forefront of theorists who are finally beginning to direct their
analytic skills towards the recovery of music outside the canon by
composers who happen to have been women.(25)
=============================================
24. See Joseph N. Straus, *Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and
the Influence of the Tonal Tradition* (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard
University Press, 1990); and Kevin Korsyn, "Towards a New Poetics of
Musical Influence," *Music Analysis* 10.1-2 (1991): 3-72.
25. Straus, ed., *Music by Women for Study and Analysis* (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993); *The Music of Ruth Crawford
Seeger* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
=============================================
[16] Has the field of music theory really changed in profound ways
over the last ten years? Well, here's a small but significant sign:
we've certainly become more adept at avoiding third-person masculine
pronouns. And, even if we're not Charles Rosen, Edward T. Cone, or
any other distinguished male writer, we might be less likely to expect
that our journal editors will delete every one of our first persons.
Speaking of distinguished persons, we *know* that our field has
changed, and that it will always be capable of change, when we note
that Allen Forte--our first SMT president, also known as the inventor
of pitch-class set theory and the author of some of the most
influential hard-core theoretical writings of the last thirty
years--has recently published a book on the American popular ballad.
For this extraordinarily diversified and versatile soul, it was no big
deal to shift from pitch-class set genera and octatonicism to Kay
Swift and Duke Ellington. And it was just as easy for Allen then to
turn to a book on the atonal music of Anton Webern.(26)
=============================================
26. Allen Forte, *The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924-
1950* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); *The Atonal Music
of Anton Webern* (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming,
Spring 1998).
=============================================
[17] Have the changes we've seen really been beneficial? You bet they
have! Like Allen Forte in particular, the field of music theory in
general has recently expressed a remarkable new diversity; in doing
so, it has found ways of achieving greater inclusiveness and
generosity. But what's so beneficial about that? To say the obvious,
every aspect of the world we live in--and that includes our musical
world--has itself become more diverse. How can we justify not
responding to this simple fact of our professional and personal lives?
Probably very much like all of you, I'm currently teaching tonal
theory to a class of young women and men from white, black, Asian,
Indian, Hispanic, Philippine, and other backgrounds. Some of these
elementary theory students would recognize the opening of Beethoven's
Third Symphony; some would not, but they may know a lot about rock
music, jazz, or African drumming. And, if they're interested in
knowing more about nearly any culture on this planet, they can
virtually surf over to check it out, through the mere flick of a
finger or two online. How can I ask these students to come with me on
journeys into the realms of early chant or Purcell or Mozart or even
Gershwin if I know nothing about the musical trips they might also
want to be taking, or if I can't help them recognize the *differences*
among styles and musical cultures that theory and analysis can help to
articulate? These same students may not be ready to tackle the
sophisticated essays in that wonderfully forward-looking new
collection *Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945*, edited by
Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann; but this collection was not
meant so much for them as for the likes of me.(27) Here, and with the
many other new publications about popular, jazz, and rock music, not
to mention new SMT sessions on these topics, are opportunities
for all of us to expand the range of our knowledge, interests, and
cultural concerns, or, for many SMT members, chances to return to the
music they grew up with. Though I won't be able to demonstrate Steven
Block's analyses of "Bemsha Swing" to my tonal theory students next
week, I can't wait to tell them that, for the first time ever, the
lead article in the very latest issue of our house journal, *Music
Theory Spectrum*, is Block's study of the transformation of a Bebop
classic to free jazz.(28)
=============================================
27. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann, eds., *Concert Music,
Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies* (Rochester,
N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1995).
28. Steven Block, "'Bemsha Swing': The Transformation of a Bebop
Classic to Free Jazz," *Music Theory Spectrum* 19.2 (1997): 206-231.
=============================================
[18] In many of the recent writings and talks about popular, jazz,
rock, and performance-artist repertoires, one senses that rare kind of
enthusiasm arising first and foremost from a deep, personal
involvement with the music. The most exciting of these and other new
studies seem to be the ones that take a cue from recent
ethnomusicology: rather than simply transferring old analytic
techniques to new styles, they seek new approaches from within those
styles and the cultures that have produced them. As always, however,
it's the personal engagement and commitment that count the most; and
this brings me back to the idea of "keeping the score."
[19] The field of music theory has been emphatically urged to branch
out. Perhaps we *can* see a case of Foucauldian institutional
regulation in the pressure music departments now exhibit to hire tonal
and atonal theorists who can also teach world music, jazz, rock, and
music by women. As one feminist has privately put it to me, a
feminist victory will truly have been achieved on the day when jobs
and tenure for women musicologists and theorists do not depend on
their ability to teach courses about women in music, so that the
"really good" music--by men--can be taught by the men. But
institutional, societal, or peer pressures tend, in the long run, to
be the least effective motivation for personal change; our individual
efforts to branch out will count for little unless they come from the
heart.
[20] Finally, I'll maintain that we theorists have not only the right
but the obligation to "keep the score"; that is, we should never feel
the need to apologize for our interest in close readings of musical
scores, nor should we have to justify our love of musical details, our
endless fascination with compositional craft and musical coherence.
There is one very obvious reason why music theory, by contrast with
our sister disciplines musicology and ethnomusicology, has been
historically, perhaps even definitively, bound to the musical score:
to theorists has fallen the task of music pedagogy; and this domain
will most likely always include the teaching of how to read, hear, and
attempt to interpret Western score notation. But there are some other
good reasons why the music text cannot be abandoned. I'm surely not
the only one who has sometimes resisted feminist and postmodernist
music criticism for the simple reason that the argument at hand has
rested on what seem like superficial and unconvincing, if not
downright inaccurate, music analyses. Even if we have fully come to
accept the truism that analyses, and the interpretations they yield,
are nothing more, or less, than documents of what we hear, what you
and I hear will always be somewhat different, and the distinct details
we choose for describing our individual responses will inevitably
yield different interpretations, both musical and cultural. If
theorists must continue to take collective pedagogical responsibility
for the development of aural, score-reading, and interpretative
musical skills, as well as responsibility for the exercise of
self-criticism, historical knowledge, and good judgment in the
preparation of analytic interpretations, then we theorists are
beholden more than ever before to work together with our colleagues in
musicology in the training of those young people who will perhaps be
addressing our societies ten years from now. Yet another
extraordinary series of changes may well be our topic at the SMT
celebration in the year 2007; but I both hope and expect that we will
still be talking about the texts of music--that we will still feel
free to cherish and keep close to the score.
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Copyright Statement
[1] *Music Theory Online* (*MTO*) as a whole is Copyright (c) 1998,
all rights reserved, by the Society for Music Theory, which is
the owner of the journal. Copyrights for individual items
published in (*MTO*) are held by their authors. Items appearing in
*MTO* may be saved and stored in electronic or paper form, and may be
shared among individuals for purposes of scholarly research or
discussion, but may *not* be republished in any form, electronic or
print, without prior, written permission from the author(s), and
advance notification of the editors of *MTO*.
[2] Any redistributed form of items published in *MTO* must
include the following information in a form appropriate to
the medium in which the items are to appear:
This item appeared in *Music Theory Online*
in [VOLUME #, ISSUE #] on [DAY/MONTH/YEAR].
It was authored by [FULL NAME, EMAIL ADDRESS],
with whose written permission it is reprinted
here.
[3] Libraries may archive issues of *MTO* in electronic or paper
form for public access so long as each issue is stored in its
entirety, and no access fee is charged. Exceptions to these
requirements must be approved in writing by the editors of *MTO*,
who will act in accordance with the decisions of the Society for
Music Theory.
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
END OF *MTO* ITEM